Monthly Archives: October 2016

The dancers were done and stood on stage as the house lights were brought up after curtain call and the petals were swept away with large brooms. Some of the troupe went down into the audience to mingle. A few people came up on the stage to talk, gesturing at the golden headdresses, wanting to touch them, but afraid of overstepping proprieties. Sok wandered upstage, avoiding conversation; she could not disrobe from her public persona and greet them in any heartfelt way. She was safe up here on high behind her smile; no need to come down to earth.

Down below, before the stage, earthbound and stuck in the mud, Lily looked on as the aura of the Apsara dancers, the closing event of the school’s cultural festival, slowly dissolved back into the banality of the badly lit high school auditorium. Her mother pushed at her to go up on stage and talk to the dancers, but Lily was rooted as firmly as Sok, and could only look on from a distance, the two of them not able to make a connection, to bridge the gap between heaven and earth.

“So many of them were killed,” Lily’s mom said to her. “They can never take away the dances you have danced, your knowledge; the only thing they can do is kill you, and even then that won’t stop the music.” The daughter grimaced and did not really reply to her mother, she was so . . . there was no need to trample over the emotion shimmering between her and the stage tonight, to try to break into that world, to force herself in where she didn’t belong; it made her angry like it always did, but her mother’s words burned into her mind and were not forgotten. Her mother was not one of them, as Lily was by blood, yet she felt the need to lecture her, but . . . mom herself was an artist, a good musician; she understood dance, and Lily’s life, adopted as an infant, was as American homegrown as the next.

The cloak of unselfconsciousness Lily threw over herself when she watched these dancers, when she waded into the world of music and was freely at home, and particularly whenever she wrote her poems, was now torn off, and an awareness of her own self and her surroundings engulfed her, suffocating her. Her mother could do that, rip her protection off, just like that, like she did just now. Without its sheltering embrace, Lily was stricken with doubt, afraid her work conveyed little of what she felt; in fact, she carried around a poem by a Russian person, Marina Tsvetaeva—Ms. MT, she called her in her mind—torn out of an old copy of Vogue, and read it whenever she felt particularly enabled.

She would read MT’s words:

Foretasting when I’ll fold
Time like a rough draft…
A flash of the eye, the last,
And the world’s not a moment old…

Then she would read her own:

What would you have done, if they had not broken you so young
The weight of obligation curves my spine.
I am not one or the other
My story is not a case of either/or…

‘A flash of an eye, a flick of the wrist. A flash of an eye, a flick of the wrist,’ Lily now repeated over and over as the evening’s disintegration spooled out without resistance. She had prodded herself with this nonsense mantra into a transcendent state; so much so that she seemed to be bouncing back and forth between the stage and where she stood until she was blurred out and was neither at one point or the other, but somewhere in between and everywhere, that she had somehow managed to overcome, just for this infinitesimal second, the weight of race, and distance, and time, and had become universal.

* * *

Sok had danced for Nuon tonight, for some reason she was stubbornly in her head. As though they had just been together yesterday, though she had been told Nuon Sitha probably died that very first day the soldiers marched into Phnom Penh, the last day of the world as they knew it. She hoped so. Sok became aware of the fervent gaze latched upon her as she moved about under the lights, and looked down at the Cambodian girl with the American mom; well the kid was American too, most likely, like Sok herself someday–maybe. Not Nuon, however . . . no. Royal. Eternally so. Khmer spirit, kindred soul. One sister in heaven; one here on earth, standing there in front of the stage, staring as if in a trance. ‘Dance,’ was what she would tell them. ‘Dance, run in your dreams of me. I dream of you. Turn your eyes toward heaven, toward better men; steer your ship into better times. Every movement, every gesture slows our evanesce.’

Cat Rescuers & Seamstresses . . . — “He compared the ballerinas’ embarkation to the taking flight of marvelous birds in a grey sky . . .” The artist, Auguste Rodin’s characterization of the departure of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia as they left France after their state visit there in 1906. Thierry Bayle, “Rodin and the Apsara,” in Beyond the Apsara, Celebrating Dance in Cambodia, London: Routledge, 2010.

Last Days Before the End of the World . . . — “Climbing onto his lap I ask him, ‘Pa, who are these men and why is everybody cheering them?’
‘They are soldiers and people are cheering because the war is over,’ he replied quietly.
“What do they want?
‘They want us,’ Pa says.
Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father, New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

“There were no shadows, no animation. The people were gone, ordered out shortly after the midday meal on the first day of victory. As the tables were being cleared the soldiers had come, and teacups and glasses of juice were left half-empty. Very little was carried away, only jewels, gold, the reliable objects of the wealthy. They had been stitched in hems and secret pockets. Scraps of papers with addresses and memories were stuffed in shoe soles. Everything else was left behind: Houses were intact, cupboards stacked carefully with sarongs and blouses, shirts and slacks, sandals and Western shoes; on their altars were images of Buddha, joss sticks, and hanging colored streamers; in the table and desk drawers were the marriage photographs, black-and-white snapshots of mother, father, grandmother, and grandfather, birth certificates and business papers. The wooden beds were softly shrouded in mosquito nets; the kitchen larders, the straw mats, all remained in place.” Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over. New York: Public Affairs, 1986, 1998.

. . . the black pajama psychology of ultimate revolution . . . — The term “ultimate revolution” is taken from a chapter of that name in Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over. Anyone seeking an understanding of what happened in Cambodia would do well to start with her comprehensive work.